Flight 826, Mainliner Will Rogers, registration was a DC-8-11 carrying 84 people from O'Hare International Airport in Chicago to Idlewild Airport in Queens. The crew was Captain Robert Sawyer, First Officer Robert Fieberg, Flight Engineer Richard Pruitt, and four stewardesses. Trans World Airlines Flight 266, Star of Sicily, registration was a Super Constellation carrying 44 people from Dayton and Columbus, Ohio, to LaGuardia Airport in Queens. The crew was Captain David Wollam, First Officer Dean Bowen, Flight Engineer LeRoy Rosenthal, and two stewardesses. Star of Sicily's sister ship N6902C, Star of the Seine, was destroyed in another mid-air collision with a United Airlines flight in 1956.
Background
At 10:21 A.M. Eastern Time, United 826 advised ARINC radio—which relayed the message to UAL maintenance—that one of its VOR receivers had stopped working. ATC, however, was not told that the flight had only one receiver, which made it more difficult for the pilots of flight 826 to identify the Preston intersection, beyond which it had not received clearance. At 10:25 A.M. Eastern Time, air traffic control issued a revised clearance for the flight to shorten its route to the Preston holding point by. That clearance included holding instructions for UAL flight 826 when it arrived at the Preston intersection. Flight 826 was expected to reduce its speed before reaching Preston, to a standard holding speed of 210 knots or less. However, the flight was estimated to be doing 301 knots when it collided with the TWA flight, several miles beyond that Preston clearance limit. During the investigation, United claimed the Colts Neck VOR was unreliable. However, the CAB final report found no problem with the Colts Neck VOR. The prevailing conditions were light rain and fog.
Collision and ground impacts
According to the DC-8's FDR, the aircraft was off course and for 81 seconds, had descended at while slowing from more than 400 Kts to 301 Kts, at the time of the collision. One of the starboard engines on the DC-8 hit the Constellation just ahead of its wings, tearing apart that portion of the fuselage. The Constellation entered a dive, with debris continuing to fall as it disintegrated during its spiral to the ground. The initial impact tore the engine from its pylon on the DC-8. Having lost one engine and a large part of the right-wing, the DC-8 remained airborne for another minute and a half. The DC-8 crashed into the Park Slope section of Brooklyn at the intersection of Seventh Avenue and Sterling Place, scattering wreckage and setting fire to ten brownstone apartment buildings, the Pillar of Fire Church, the McCaddin Funeral Home, a Chinese laundry, and a delicatessen. Six people on the ground were killed. The crash left the remains of the DC-8 pointed southeast towards a large open field at Prospect Park, blocks from its crash site. A student at the school who lived in one of the destroyed apartment buildings said his family survived because they happened to be in the only room of their apartment not destroyed. The crash left a trench covering most of the length of the middle of Sterling Place. Occupants of the school thought a bombhad gone off or that the building's boiler had exploded. The TWA plane crashed onto the northwest corner of Miller Field, at, with some sections of the aircraft landing in New York Harbor. At least one passenger fell into a tree before the wreckage hit the ground. There was no radio contact with traffic controllers from either plane after the collision, although LaGuardia had begun tracking an incoming, fast-moving, unidentified plane from Preston toward the LaGuardia "Flatbush" outer marker.
Investigation
The likely cause of the accident was identified in a report by the US Civil Aeronautics Board.
Initial survivor
The only person to initially survive the crash was an 11-year-old boy from Wilmette, Illinois. He was traveling on Flight 826 unaccompanied as part of his family's plans to spend Christmas in Yonkers with relatives. He was thrown from the plane into a snowbank where his burning clothing was extinguished. Although alive and conscious, he was badly burned and had inhaled burning fuel. He died of pneumonia the next day.
The events of the collision are documented in the 5th season 1 episode of The Weather Channel documentary Why Planes Crash. The episode is titled "Collision Course" and was first aired in April 2013.
